What's up with "ZeM"?

Monday, March 7, 2016

We drove straight from Monteverde to Coco Beach where we had a reservation for 6 days. It was amazing to discover in such a short distance (3 h drive) the variety of landscape from the Cloud Forest to the dry Eastern Coast.

We spent the next day enjoying the beautiful beach of Playa Hermosa and relaxed under the trees and as well as in the warm ocean...

We finished our afternoon by going to a second beach - Playa Ocotal - which we had heard had unusual black sand...

Mark decided to act like a monkey and the Costa Rican family which was located right by us got its entertainment... The Grandpa thought it was so funny that he gave it a try too!

We were just having fun communicating in broken Spanish with them when we mentioned that we really wanted to see monkeys... One of the adults replied that there were a dozen monkeys who lived on the other side of the beach! What a gift to watch them eat flowers from that tree...!

Beautiful beach, fun company and great memories!

The next day, we drove an hour and took the short way (on dirt bumpy roads!) to reach Playa Grande where we spent the day and did body boarding...

We socialized with the family close by from Canada and relaxed under the palm trees when we were not in the waves... We got a lot of sun that day... and some sunburns!

As we were leaving, surfers were arriving to take advantage of the high tide... but interestingly, a lot of surfers were on the beach in big groups watching the water... We learned shortly after that a crocodile was swimming in there... You are probably wondering (with reason) how in the world would a crocodile be in the ocean... We found out that Playa Grande has 2 rivers on each side that run into the ocean and the crocodile was most likely trying to reach the other river... We are just glad we did not meet him in the water... =)

We started off by leaving the DC blizzard (and take one of the first flights since the airport had been reopened) and fly to San Jose. We were welcome by a 82 degree sunny afternoon!

After dealing with Alamo and accepting reluctantly to pay an extra $400 for a rental car insurance, we faced the traffic of San Jose for a short time and then took the direction of Monteverde in the central part of Costa Rica... Everything went very smooth until we started to climb in the dark the dirty rocky mountain roads to reach Monteverde...!

Our first night was in a lovely and charming hotel "the Historia Lodge"
and we enjoyed our first typical dinner "Cassada" at a local restaurant.

Mark noticed that the shoes I had packed would be rough on his heels so we started off (after a hearty breakfast also typically Costa Rican) by going to a pharmacy to get band aids.

Monteverde is in the mountains of the cloud forest and the weather is very unique: 80 degrees at 9am with a gentle breeze and a mist... quite pleasant when you are walking up steep hills!

When we got to the adventure park it was raining and it was very cloudy... we debated to pay the large amount of money to go zip lining if the clouds were going to hide everything... after talking to several members of the Staff and to each other, we decided to get the whole package since this was a once in a life time opportunity...!

We started by a walking tour with a guide through the cloud forest and 7 hanging bridges... The guide was so knowledgeable and pointed out so many things that we would have missed otherwise such as birds, a tarantula and huge diversity of vegetation...

Time for something we had wanted to try for years: zip lining!!

As we were going up the mountain via cable cars, we started to be in the middle of the clouds and could not see anything!

Here are some views from the last zip lines where you can see the hanging bridges we walked earlier that day... We ended our series of 8 zip lines by bun-jee cord jumping from a platform! What a fantastic adventure!

Tuesday, October 27, 2015

Sunday, October 25, 2015

In October Dean and Michele and their girls came to visit us and the many educational sites that are located in our area...
We took them to one of our favorite places... Great Falls! The weather was fantastic and the colors splendid!

Wednesday, June 3, 2015

We purchased earlier this year a all-season shelter and decided to try it out on Memorial Day weekend... It was good that it was a 4-day weekend because between the time it took us to set it up and the time to disassemble it and pack it away, we did not get to enjoy it for long...
We stayed at the Camp Liahona located near Gettysburg and it was a beautiful site...
We cooked using our solar oven and our volcano and everything was delicious!